Aniela vs. Aneilia

Since announcing the name of our upcoming arrival, Aniela Grace, I have received a few messages and comments about how the name may be mispronounced and confused with the name Anielia, so I thought I would do a comparison of the two names and break them down to show the differences in pronunciation and spelling.

Aniela

Aneilia

First of all, note the the difference in the arrangement of the n, e, i, and l in both of the names. This is what I believe people are confusing. You have to remember that the name "Neil" is an exception to the "i before e" rule, hence why Aniela would more than likely be pronounced as "On-yell-a" or "Ann-yell-ah", the latter being how we will be pronouncing it. In order for our girl's name to be pronounced "A-Kneel-ya", we would need to have "N-E-I-L" in that particular order. Also, the ending of the name would have to be different, as I'm about to show.

Aniela

Aneilia

Note the ending of the two names. Aniela ends with just "a" which makes the "ah" sound, while Aneilia ends with "ia" which makes the "ya" sound ... definitely not the same thing.

Hopefully this helps those who are confused and think it will be mispronounced. Upon showing it to my family and friends, all of them pronounced it correctly off the bat, prior to me telling them that we would be pronouncing it as "Ann-yell-ah." Remember too that this name has many origins, and we're using the Italian pronunciation. Nonetheless, upon looking into the name more, I have only seen it pronounced two ways when spelled as A-N-I-E-L-A, and those would be the pronunciations that I gave earlier. Not to say that there aren't people who pronounce it the other way, but I have personally not seen it to be pronounced that way with the spelling we are using. I even found the name Niela, which is our little ones name without the "A" on the front, and it is pronounced "Knee-yell-ah," not "Neil-ya." I apologize for the grammar lesson, but I felt the need to clarify. Other than an almost (but not quite) similar spelling, the dialect used to pronounce the two names is completely different. I do understand that many people come from different places and pronounce things differently though, so hopefully this blog has helped those of you who were a bit confused.